Microsoft Announced couple of days ago that it will extend its support for Antimalware and Antivirus products running on Windows XP till July 2015. This is really good news for Enterprises moving and migrating from XP to newer versions as well as personal users and individuals with Windows XP.

Microsoft earlier announced that Windows XP end of support is April 8, 2014 which includes any support for bugs, security issues or any Operating system support. On top of that was the Antimalware and Antivirus signatures.  Windows XP operating system launched more than 10 years ago was a very successful OS for Microsoft and was highly adopted by Organizations and personal computers. According to recent statistics Windows XP is being used on almost 30% of Desktops as per below Market share Statistics Link.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Windows+XP&qpcustomb=0

This was probably the main reason for Microsoft to Extend the Anti Malware/Virus Support for another year after the XP end of support. This extension applies to enterprise users running System Center End Point Protection, Forefront Client Security and Forefront Endpoint Protection. Also Personal users running Security Essentials will be covered as well.

For more details please check the below link.


http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft-antimalware-support-for-windows-xp.aspx


This extension will not stop the XP end of support scheduled April, 2014. There will be no Security or Critical updates for Windows XP after April, 2014. Its still highly recommended to move ASAP to newer version of Windows for full support.

While checking the WSUS Products and Classifications i noticed that some products as the System Center Service Manager is not listed, also i noticed that the System Center 2012 R2 Products are not listed at all even with the latest updates (I am running WSUS on Windows server 2012 R2).

Upon checking the Microsoft Update Catalog on the Internet, i noticed that Service Manager is not listed/published on the Catalog as well, this explains why SCSM updates are not listed in the WSUS. For the current state WSUS is not designed to give SCSM under Products and Classifications as its not yet under the Catalog.

As for the System Center 2012 R2, they were just released less than 2 month ago and the next expected Rollup Will be mostly in the first quarter of 2014. I double checked with Microsoft Support team and they replied back that the Product team is working on WSUS hotfix/Service Pack/Release..........etc that might list the 2012 R2 Products.

Recommended links for WSUS

1. Microsoft Update Catalog: http://catalog.update.microsoft.com
2. Deploy WSUS 2012 and 2012R2 in your organization: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852340.aspx

Recently i was trying to delete/Remove one of the old computer groups under WSUS Console - Computers - All Computers. This Group was an old group with no members/Clients or any pending approvals any more. I tried removing it from the GUI by Right licking the object and Delete but the server hanged and i got connection error as shown below.

Microsoft WSUS administrators sometimes tend to select all given Products (Options - Products and Classifications) and by time the WSUS content folder grows dramatically till it fill all disk space. If the WSUS administrator tries to uncheck or deselect unneeded products later on, this won't save or minimize the current space.

So how do the WSUS updates gets downloaded/Propagated on the WSUS server ?

1. WSUS server contacts the Microsoft Update servers and will only downloads the metadata (Not complete Full Update Package)
2. The Binaries or the actual downloads are only downloaded when you approve them manually or if there is an Auto approval rule configured.